VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Several central and Eastern European countries began marking on Thursday the 20th anniversary of the largest expansion of the NATO military alliance when formerly socialist countries became members of the bloc.
Military aircraft roared over the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. At the main airbase hosting Spanish and Portuguese fighter jets tasked with NATO air policing missions in the Baltic region, officials gathered to commemorate the event.
“Russia’s new bloody terror in Europe is contributing to the growth of instability and threats around the world. However, we in Lithuania are calm because we know that we will never be alone again,” said President Gitanas Nauseda, standing near the runway where the first NATO jets landed back in 2004. “We will always have a strong, supportive Alliance family by our side, and we will face any challenges together.”
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined NATO on March 29 in 2004, bringing the total membership of the Alliance to 26. The seven nations started accession negotiations soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union and eventually were invited to join at the Prague Summit in November 2002. Another group of former Soviet satellites including Poland and the Czech Republic had been admitted several years earlier.
Since joining the alliance, these countries often warned about the threat of Russia, using their national trauma of Soviet occupation as proof of credibility. While Western nations often dismissed their sometimes hawkish attitude, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is seen as a vindication of those fears. They have given some of the most robust responses, helping Ukraine with equipment and money, and pushing for even greater sanctions on Russia.
Most of the former Soviet Republics that joined NATO at the turn of the millennium spend more than the required 2% of gross domestic product on defense. When Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis announced his bid earlier this month to become the next leader of the alliance, he emphasized the threat from Russia and said the alliance needs a “renewal of perspectives” that Eastern Europe could provide.
“Russia is proving to be a serious and long-term threat to our continent, to our Euro-Atlantic security,” the 65-year-old said when he announced his bid. “NATO’s borders become of paramount importance, and the strengthening of the eastern flank … will remain a long-term priority.”
The seven countries are marking the anniversary with solemn events and shows of force, but also some levity, with open-air concerts and exhibitions.
“Twenty years ago the Bulgarian people made the right choice for our country to join NATO,” the country’s defense chief Adm. Emil Eftimov said. “Given today’s security situation, this is the most appropriate decision we have made in our recent history.”
NATO was established in the aftermath of World War II.
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Associated Press writers Stephen McGrath in Sighisoara, Romania, and Veselin Toshkov in Sofia, Bulgaria contributed to this report.
Search efforts paused after two bodies found in Baltimore bridge collapse, focus turns to clearing d
Search efforts paused after two bodies found in Baltimore bridge collapse, focus turns to clearing d
02:46
BALTIMORE — The search for bodies was paused Wednesday as attention turned to clearing debris from the deadly collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and reopening the Port of Baltimore.
The bodies of two construction workers were recovered from a submerged truck Wednesday. Four people remain missing and are presumed dead, but divers can no longer operate around the mangled bridge debris that has encased submerged vehicles, officials said.
The span was struck by a cargo ship that had lost power shortly after it left the Port of Baltimore early Tuesday morning.
The U.S. Navy said it is mobilizing barges outfitted with heavy lift cranes to help clear the Patapsco River of debris. Three cranes with varying lift capacities and support vessels are expected to begin removing submerged portions of the bridge, but it’s unclear when they will arrive.
Reopening channel ‘essential’ for port
All vessel traffic in and out of the port was suspended in the wake of the collapse, but it has remained open for trucks.
The Army Corps of Engineers will assist the salvage effort so that the Patapsco River’s shipping lanes, the entry to the port, can reopen.
The port is the ninth busiest in the United States, according to Census data, and handled more than $80 billion in import-exports last year, the most in 20 years. It is also home to Royal Caribbean, Carnival and Norwegian cruise lines.
Directly, the port supports 15,300 jobs, while another 140,000 in the area are related to port activities. The jobs provide a combined $3.3 billion in personal income, according to a CBS News report.
“The most urgent priority is to open the Port of Baltimore because it is essential to the livelihood of people here in Baltimore, in Maryland, and the economies across our country and around the world,” U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen said in a press conference Wednesday.
Maryland lawmakers are drafting emergency legislation for income replacement to assist thousands of Port of Baltimore workers impacted by the disruption.
Four remain missing, presumed dead
Eight people, part of a construction crew filling potholes, were on the bridge at the time of the collapse. Two were rescued, two bodies have been recovered, and four remain missing.
Two bodies recovered near Key Bridge collapse site
08:27
So far, three of the victims have been identified:
Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, 35, originally from Honduras and who has been living in the U.S. for 20 years
Miguel Luna, originally from El Salvador
Dorlian Castillo Cabrera, 26, originally from Guatemala
The Guatemalan Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed two of the missing men were from Guatemala, according to a Tuesday evening news release.
Honduras’ Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Antonio García told The Associated Press a Honduran citizen was missing, and the Mexican Embassy in Washington said there were Mexicans among the six as well.
The men are in their 30s and 40s and have spouses and children in Dundalk and Highlandtown, the Baltimore Banner reports.
Employer vows to help families
Jeffrey Pritzker, executive vice president of Hunt Valley-based general contractor Brawner Builders, told CBS MoneyWatch the workers had company-sponsored life insurance, but declined to disclose details regarding the policies.
Brawner intends to offer financial assistance to the missing workers’ families as they cope with the sudden loss of income, Pritzker said, without providing additional details on the company’s plans.
“The company is doing everything possible to support the families and to counsel the families and to be with the families,” Brawner Builders executive vice president Jeffrey Pritzker said.
Separately, a GoFundMe campaign is aiming to raise $60,000 to help their survivors. Organized by the Latino Racial Justice Circle, an advocacy group that fights racial injustice, it raised more than $98,000 as of Thursday morning. Brawner Builders is linking to the GoFundMe on its website, directing people who wish to support the families to the fundraising effort.
Disaster in minutes
The National Transportation Safety Board said the Dali, the striking ship, left the terminal at the Port of Baltimore around 12:39 a.m. Tuesday.
By 1:24 a.m., alarms started going off that something was wrong. At 1:27 a.m., the pilot ordered crews to drop the anchor and called for tugs, telling officials the vessel lost power and was headed toward the bridge.
And just two minutes later, the massive cargo ship crashed into the bridge at 8 mph.
The NTSB said police had just 90 seconds from when they received distress calls to cut the bridge off to traffic and to try to get people off.
A police officer patrolling because of the work on the bridge tried to get the construction workers off before it was too late, according to officials.
The ship was carrying 56 containers of corrosive, flammable material and batteries, some of which were breached, according to NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy. She said one of the hazardous materials, sheen, which is used in paint, had leaked into the Patapsco River. The environmental impact is still unclear.
State, federal leaders give update on recovery of Key Bridge collapse victims
32:49
Replacing a critical bridge
The Francis Scott Key Bridge crosses the Patapsco River and is the outermost of three toll crossings of Baltimore’s Harbor and the final link in Interstate 695, which connects Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
The bridge was completed in 1977 after the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel reached capacity and experienced heavy congestion almost daily, according to the MDTA. The 1.6-mile span was used by some 31,000 people per day and carried 11.5 million vehicles annually.
Maryland submitted a request to the federal government for emergency relief funds to rebuild the Key Bridge and reopen the port, Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul Weidefeld said Wednesday.
“We intend to receive some federal dollars quickly and then we will start with the design for the replacement of the bridge to the port and get the community back up and running,” he said.
President Biden said Wednesday that he intends to push the federal government to pay entirely for the replacement bridge, and pledged to work with Maryland leaders to provide as much support as possible.
Senator Van Hollen said it was too early to put a price tag on the new bridge, but he called on Congress to work together to provide resources quickly.
“This is an American challenge,” Van Hollen said. “We are a great American city here in Baltimore. We are hoping all of our colleagues come together and join us in making sure we rebuild the bridge.”
Rohan Mattu
Rohan Mattu is a digital producer at CBS News Baltimore. Rohan graduated from Towson University in 2020 with a degree in journalism and previously wrote for WDVM-TV in Hagerstown. He maintains WJZ’s website and social media, which includes breaking news in everything from politics to sports.
SAO PAULO (Reuters) – When the presidents of Amazon nations including Brazil, Peru and Colombia meet at a regional summit next week, they will train their sights on a new breed of criminal just as comfortable chopping down the rainforest as shipping drugs overseas.
“Narco-deforestation,” as it was referred to in a United Nations report last month, represents a new target for law enforcement operating in the Amazon rainforest, where the lines between specialist criminal outfits are increasingly blurred.
The eight member countries of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), who are due to meet in the northeastern Brazilian city of Belem for an Aug. 8-9 summit, are expected to reach an agreement to cooperate on combating such crimes, said Carlos Lazary, the organization’s executive director.
“We’re worried about the Amazon,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who proposed the summit on the campaign trail, said in a speech last month. “It’s there that organized crime, drug trafficking and everything illegal is fomented.”
Boosted by bumper Andean coca harvests and record-breaking cocaine demand in Europe, the Amazon has in recent years become a drug-trafficking thoroughfare. Illicit cargos easily pass through the vast, sparsely populated and thinly policed region on boats, planes or even submarines on their way to the Atlantic Ocean.
With booming profits, many of the drug gangs in the Amazon are now laundering the money through illegal land speculation, logging, mining and other means, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warned in its annual World Drug Report.
Charles Nascimento, a Brazilian Federal Police officer and veteran of the Amazon drugs beat, said criminal groups often use existing drug routes to get illegally harvested gold and wood to market.
“Many people who work in wildcat mines also work as traffickers and vice versa,” he said. “It’s like they feed off of each other.”
This increasing criminal cross-pollination has prompted police to expand a recurring Amazon anti-narcotics operation between Peru and Brazil, scheduled for later this year, to also target environmental crimes, Nascimento said.
REMOTE MURDERS
The 2022 murders of indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips, allegedly at the hands of a poaching ring with organized crime connections, prompted Lula to increase policing in remote areas, Nascimento said.
Lula – who has staked his international reputation on ending the rampant deforestation that surged under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro – has reeled off a flurry of measures to combat environmental crime since taking office on Jan. 1.
The most important has been the creation of a specialized Federal Police directorate focused on the Amazon and environmental crime.
His administration has also proposed a center for international police cooperation in the Amazon’s largest city of Manaus, which may factor into the final agreement at the summit, ACTO’s Lazary said.
Neighboring countries – as well as agencies in developed countries importing illegal wood and gold – will be invited to send permanent representatives to the center to help coordinate investigations, said Valdecy Urquiza, head of the Federal Police’s international cooperation directorate.
At a meeting of international police in Belem a day before next week’s presidential summit, Brazil will also promote plans to share lab technology that can pinpoint whether wood and good is illegally sourced, Urquiza said.
Databases of gold and wood samples taken from around the Amazon – which use molecular analysis to identify the specific locations of the source – can help police determine if seized goods originated in an area where it is illegal to mine, such as in Indigenous reserves, Urquiza said.
Brazil – which will host the global COP30 climate change summit in Belem in 2025 – has begun to train police in Latin America and Europe on these methods.
Past international meetings and agreements have largely failed to generate much cooperation between wary national police forces in the Amazon, said Robert Muggah, lead author of the U.N. report’s chapter on organized crime in the Amazon.
Amazon countries signed a strongly worded commitment to cooperate on environmental crimes in the 2019 Leticia Declaration. But Brazil’s Bolsonaro and former Colombia President Ivan Duque excluded leftist Venezuela, and the signatories failed to follow through with concrete actions, Muggah said. South America’s swing left under Lula and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro may help improve cooperation, he added.
“Crime is among the top, if not the top issue confronting the protection of a standing forest in the Amazon,” he said. “It should be concerning to our decision-makers.”
(Reporting by Jake Spring in Sao Paulo and Gabriel Stargardter in Rio de Janeiro; Editing by Brad Haynes and Rosalba O’Brien)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Institutes of Health is beginning a handful of studies to test possible treatments for long COVID, an anxiously awaited step in U.S. efforts against the mysterious condition that afflicts millions.
Monday’s announcement from the NIH’s $1.15 billion RECOVER project comes amid frustration from patients who’ve struggled for months or even years with sometimes-disabling health problems — with no proven treatments and only a smattering of rigorous studies to test potential ones.
“This is a year or two late and smaller in scope than one would hope but nevertheless it’s a step in the right direction,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University in St. Louis, who isn’t involved with NIH’s project but whose own research highlighted long COVID’s toll. Getting answers is critical, he added, because “there’s a lot of people out there exploiting patients’ vulnerability” with unproven therapies.
Scientists don’t yet know what causes long COVID, the catchall term for about 200 widely varying symptoms. Between 10% and 30% of people are estimated to have experienced some form of long COVID after recovering from a coronavirus infection, a risk that has dropped somewhat since early in the pandemic.
“If I get 10 people, I get 10 answers of what long COVID really is,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said.
That’s why so far the RECOVER initiative has tracked 24,000 patients in observational studies to help define the most common and burdensome symptoms –- findings that now are shaping multipronged treatment trials. The first two will look at:
— Whether taking up to 25 days of Pfizer’s antiviral drug Paxlovid could ease long COVID, because of a theory that some live coronavirus, or its remnants, may hide in the body and trigger the disorder. Normally Paxlovid is used when people first get infected and for just five days.
— Treatments for “brain fog” and other cognitive problems. They include Posit Science Corp.’s BrainHQ cognitive training program, another called PASC-Cognitive Recovery by New York City’s Mount Sinai Health System, and a Soterix Medical device that electrically stimulates brain circuits.
Two additional studies will open in the coming months. One will test treatments for sleep problems. The other will target problems with the autonomic nervous system — which controls unconscious functions like breathing and heartbeat — including the disorder called POTS.
A more controversial study of exercise intolerance and fatigue also is planned, with NIH seeking input from some patient groups worried that exercise may do more harm than good for certain long COVID sufferers.
The trials are enrolling 300 to 900 adult participants for now but have the potential to grow. Unlike typical experiments that test one treatment at a time, these more flexible “platform studies” will let NIH add additional potential therapies on a rolling basis.
“We can rapidly pivot,” Dr. Amy Patterson with the NIH explained. A failing treatment can be dropped without ending the entire trial and “if something promising comes on the horizon, we can plug it in.”
The flexibility could be key, according to Dr. Anthony Komaroff, a Harvard researcher who isn’t involved with the NIH program but has long studied a similarly mysterious disorder known as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME/CFS. For example, he said, the Paxlovid study “makes all sorts of sense,” but if a 25-day dose shows only hints of working, researchers could extend the test to a longer course instead of starting from scratch.
Komaroff also said that he understands people’s frustration over the wait for these treatment trials, but believes NIH appropriately waited “until some clues came in about the underlying biology,” adding: “You’ve got to have targets.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Brittney Griner will skip an upcoming road trip with the Phoenix Mercury “to focus on her mental health,” the team announced on Saturday. The WNBA star is going to miss at least two games that her team is scheduled to play during the trip to Chicago and Indiana this week, although the Mercury said it is still finalizing “a timeline for her return” to the court.
“Mercury center Brittney Griner will not travel with the team on its upcoming two-game road trip to Chicago and Indiana (July 30-August 1) to focus on her mental health. The Mercury fully support Brittney and we will continue to work together on a timeline for her return,” the team wrote on social media Saturday afternoon.
Mercury center Brittney Griner will not travel with the team on its upcoming two-game road trip to Chicago and Indiana (July 30-August 1) to focus on her mental health. The Mercury fully support Brittney and we will continue to work together on a timeline for her return.
Griner, an Olympic gold medalist and seasoned WNBA all-star, originally returned to the league earlier this year after being released from custody in Russia. The professional athlete had been detained in Russian prisons for nearly 10 months on drug charges before she was freed in a high-profile prisoner swap last December for an arms dealer previously imprisoned in the United States.
Griner re-signed a contract with the Phoenix Mercury, the team where she had played for years prior to the detainment, in the months following her arrival back home. She made her first official game-time appearance this season when the Mercury played against the Los Angeles Sparks in May. About a month later, Griner played in her first All-Star game since her return.
“It meant everything to me,” Griner told the crowd after the All-Star game, CNN reported. “I didn’t think that I would be here today, honestly but everybody sending letters, sending love, posting. I’m still seeing it to this day everything that everybody did. It really meant a lot to me, it gave me hope it made me not want to just give it up for anything, so it was this league that helped me out.”
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Brittney Griner on Saturday became the latest high-profile athlete to prioritize mental health when her WNBA team announced she won’t travel for a Chicago series.
The Phoenix Mercury said Griner would not be on board when the team embarks on a two-game road trip Sunday through Tuesday against the Chicago Sky.
She’s opting out “to focus on her mental health,” the team tweeted.
“The Mercury fully support Brittney and we will continue to work together on a timeline for her return,” the three-championship team said.
Griner, 32, spent several months in Russian custody after she was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport in February 2022 when security personnel found vape canisters with cannabis oil in her luggage. The star center said she packed the items inadvertently and later she said used the substance to aid in recovery from injuries.
Griner was given a nine-year prison sentence in August and released in December in a prisoner swap negotiated by the Biden administration.
At the time she was detained, Griner was a contract star for UMMC Ekaterinburg in Yekaterinburg, Russia, a base during the WNBA off-season.
Griner is the latest big-name athlete who has cited mental health in the decision to skip events or take a break in the hyper-focused world of pro sports.
In recent years, Black women at the top of their disciplines have helped drive the conversation about mental health as a key and shame-free component of human health.
In 2021, tennis phenom Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open after her pleas to skip media interviews in the name of her mental health were rebuffed by tournament officials. She was ranked No. 2 in the world at the time and also later withdrew from Wimbledon.
The U.S. Open subsequently announced that players would have access to licensed mental health providers and quiet rooms.
Also that year, superstar gymnast Simone Biles, 24, withdrew from several events at the Tokyo Olympics, citing mental health as the reason. She has also revealed she has seen a psychologist and taken anxiety medication.
Dennis Romero
Dennis Romero is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.
